History 5255 Europe Since 1989: Multiple Europes after the Cold War

Instructor: Dragostinova, Theodora

Days/Times: WF, 9:35-10:55AM

This course explores the post-Cold War history of Europe. Students will pay attention to multiple definitions and changing understandings of Europe, teasing out the evolution in European identities in the last 30 years. Fundamentally, this is a class about what it means to be European, which allows students to learn about the multiple meanings, manifestations, and interpretations of citizenship.

History 5650 Special Topics in World/Global/Transnational History

Instructor: Bond, Elizabeth

Days/Times: T, 11:10AM-1:55PM

This special topics seminar is open to undergraduate and graduate students interested in the history of books, from the era of Gutenberg to the nineteenth century. We will traverse the entire communication circuit, studying the roles of authors, publishers, printers, booksellers, and readers. We will explore what it means to study books, both for their ideas and as objects. The course includes visits to OSU Libraries' Special Collections.

History 7230 Studies in Medieval History

Instructor: Tanner, Heather

Days/Times: F, 2:15-5:00PM

This graduate seminar examines the economic history of medieval Europe from c. 500 to c. 1500 through the lens of some of the field's most influential debates. Topics include the transformation of the post-Roman economy, gift exchange and plunder, the rise of lordship and serfdom, the growth of trade and towns, commercialization, and the economic consequences of environmental change. Throughout the course, women and households are treated as central economic actors, while recent work in archaeology, environmental history, and material culture is placed in conversation with classic interpretations. Together, the readings explore how medieval people produced, exchanged, controlled, and contested wealth over a millennium of profound economic change.

History 7240 Studies in Early Modern European History

Instructor: Flannigan, Laura

Days/Times: W, 9:35AM-12:20PM

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were transformational times in British history, and so too in its political thought. Intensification of monarchical government, extensive reformation of religion and worship, and outright conflict between sovereign and society under successive Tudor and Stuart governments meant that the political system looked very different by 1640 compared to a couple of centuries earlier. A growing body of treatises, pamphlets, and poems sought to make sense of these developments. This course explores the period’s written political thought and its contexts, including such classics as More’s Utopia and Hobbes’s Leviathan, and from the Wars of the Roses to the Glorious Revolution.

Several questions predominated in political thought across this period: How was society structured? Who should be allowed to rule? How should the relationship between sovereign and subjects be managed? We will begin with lingering medieval, moralistic visions of monarchy and the emerging influence of European humanist thinking on visions of the state. Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, Henry VIII’s break from Rome and commencement of an English Reformation spurred a flurry of pamphlet literature, much of it questioning received ideas about authority and obedience. The accession of queens regnant to the thrones of both England and Scotland in the later sixteenth century occasioned extensive commentary on whether women could fit into existing models of rulership. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne gave rise to comparisons between styles of governance on either side of the border. James’s own writings, produced to advise his heirs, offer the chance to study a prince’s political thinking. Finally, we will explore sentiments on the proper structuring of state and society produced on the eve of civil conflict, in the writings of Thomas Hobbes; and the utopian visions of Margaret Cavendish in the Interregnum period.

Emphasis in these graduate reading seminars will be on close analysis of the assigned primary texts, and consideration of the changeable contexts in which they were written. The course will therefore introduce students to the methods of intellectual history as well as to the principal events and thinkers of early modern England.

History 7280 Studies in Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History

Instructor: Hoffmann, David

Days/Times: M, 11:15AM-2:00PM

This course is a graduate colloquium on selected topics in Soviet history. The purpose of the course is to introduce students to the most influential works and approaches in the field. Each week we will discuss a major book on Soviet history with attention both to the historical events discussed and the historiographical approach utilized by the author.

History 7350 Studies in Islamic History

Empire, Imperialism, and Resistance in the Middle East

Instructor: Akin, Yigit

Days/Times: R, 11:15AM-2:00PM

This graduate seminar examines the historical dynamics of empire, imperialism, and anti-imperial resistance in the Middle East from the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire to the present. The course explores how imperial governance shaped political authority, economic structures, legal regimes, and social hierarchies across the region. At the same time, it examines how imperial power was negotiated, contested, and transformed by a wide range of actors. Particular attention will be given to local and transnational forms of resistance, including anticolonial movements, nationalist revolutions and counter-revolutions, and post-imperial imaginaries that redefined sovereignty and political community. By situating Middle Eastern experiences within broader global debates on colonialism, empire, sovereignty, and decolonization, the seminar encourages students to think comparatively and critically about the enduring legacies of imperial rule.

History 7550 Studies in Military History

Constructing the Enemy: Alterity, Identity and Warfare, from World War I to the Present

Instructor: Cabanes, Bruno

Days/Times: T, 5:30-8:15PM

This graduate seminar examines the historical construction of the enemy from the First World War to twenty-first century warfare, tracing how political authorities, military institutions, and societies have defined and represented their adversaries across periods of conflict and crisis. Situating the study of enmity within the histories of total war, imperialism and ideological conflict, the course explores how changing historical circumstances shape the boundaries between friend and foe. Students will engage foundational theories of alterity alongside historiographical debates to investigate the historical processes through which enemy images are produced, institutionalized, and challenged, and how these constructions have shaped wartime mobilization, domestic politics, civilian life, and the treatment of enemies.

History 7550 Studies in Military History

The Making of Strategy from Classical Greece to the Iraq War

Instructor: Mansoor, Peter

Days/Times: W, 5:30-8:15PM

This course analyzes the making of strategy, with emphasis on grand strategy, through a number of case studies from ancient times to the present, among them Athenian and Spartan strategies during the Peloponnesian War, the grand strategy of Rome and the Carthaginian empire during the Punic Wars, Edward III’s strategy in the Hundred Years War, the strategy of Hapsburg Spain, strategy in the Seven Years’ War, British strategy during the American War for Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, strategy in the U.S. Civil War, Anglo-American strategy in 1942, and American strategy in the Iraq War.

History 7600 Studies in the History of Women and Gender

Instructor: Soland, Birgitte

Days/Times: M, 7:00-9:45PM

Readings course for graduate students focusing on the history of women and gender.  The course content will be international, emphasizing cross-cultural comparisons.

History 7705 Graduate Readings in the History of Technology

Instructor: Otter, Christopher

Days/Times: M, 10:00AM-12:45PM

Technology is implicated in almost every conceivable historical event, trend or process: industrial, economic, sexual, military, architectural, biological and cultural. But technology itself often remains an underanalyzed and rather mysterious (or “blackboxed”) entity. Its precise function is often simplified and undertheorized. This course is designed to provide a methodological toolkit for students wishing to analyze technology and explore the historical role of technology through a series of different historical case studies.

These case studies are largely drawn from the modern west, but these approaches to technology could be applied to almost any technological phenomenon in history. They are designed to illuminate the way in which technology has been implicated in numerous historical phenomena: state-formation, war, gender relations, agriculture, ecology, health and so on. The books themselves are drawn from the eclectic, interdisciplinary field of “technology studies,” which brings together sociology, science studies, history, philosophy, communications and urban studies.

History 7900 Colloquium in Historiography and Critical Theory 

Instructor: Anderson, Gregor

Days/Times: T, 2:15-5:00PM

This is the History Department's required foundation course for advanced study in the discipline. It offers a broad introduction to contemporary ways of exploring and interpreting realities past and present. To do this, it combines an overview of the evolution of history as a discipline with discussion of the currents of social/critical theory which have shaped the more influential modes of historical analysis along the way. The course focuses in particular on historiographical and theoretical developments of the past fifty years or so. And to support Department’s express commitment to anti-racism, it foregrounds theoretical currents that seek to expose forms of systemic racism, both in conventional modern historical practice and in the modern capitalist world as a whole. Ultimately, the class aspires to help students prepare themselves for the job market, both as critically self-aware citizen-historians and as critically informed evaluators of the thought and work of others.

History 7910 Prospectus Writing 

Instructor: Smith, Stephanie

Days/Times: R, 3:55-6:40PM | Online Synchronous

This graduate seminar is dedicated to researching and writing your dissertation prospectus. Throughout the semester we will focus on the craft of historical writing, strategies, and the practicalities of launching a research project. As we move through the class, you will analyze various issues, including your topic/questions/significance; your argument/thesis; historiography; method and theory; primary and secondary sources; organization; timetable; research plan; funding; writing an abstract, and your bibliography. We also will consider such matters as grammar and style. By the end of this course, you will have produced a dissertation prospectus that you will present to your committee members.

In preparing your prospectus you will draw particularly on three areas of support:

• First, your fellow students are a valuable source for feedback. In this course you will help each other launch your projects.
• Second, I will read your drafts and offer advice.
• Third, your advisor and members of your dissertation committee are the experts to whom you will turn for substantive advice about archives, resources, and the feasibility of your project.

History 8801 Seminar in History 

Instructor: Conklin, Alice

Days/Times: M, 2:15-5:00PM

This research/writing seminar provides an opportunity to complete a major research project (such as an M.A. paper, dissertation chapter, or article) in the field of Modern History broadly defined. The course will emphasize how to conceptualize a viable research topic, critically engage the appropriate primary and secondary sources, and develop methodological approaches for analyzing these materials and constructing a convincing (and captivating!) argument. While the course will allow some time for additional research, students should have gathered the research materials for their project and begun to go through them before the seminar’s start. Our main activity will be writing an essay of 30 pages in three stages and learning how to pitch your research compellingly in a very short oral presentation. Students will receive regular constructive feedback from other seminar members at each stage of the writing and benefit from a supportive and collegial intellectual community in which to write up their research findings.

Prerequisites: Have your topic identified and research underway by the start of class. Please obtain permission from the instructor to enroll.